Putin Accomplice Julian Assange Arrested in London

Julian Assange, an ally of Vladimir Putin and seemingly Donald Trump as well has at long last been booted from the Ecuador embassy in London and was promptly arrested and carried away by London Metropolitan police (see the image at the end of this post). Unless one has been living under a rock - or watching only Fox News - it is common knowledge that Assange and his Wikileaks organization was the vehicle through which emails and documents stolen by Russian intelligence officers were released to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Trump associate Roger Stone remains under federal indictment for lying to Congress about his communications with Assange and Russian intelligence operatives.  The Guardian looks at Assange arrest while the New York Times looks at the larger implications.  First highlights from The Guardian: 

Julian Assange has been arrested at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, after the South American country withdrew asylum from the WikiLeaks founder.  Assange had been granted refuge at the embassy while on bail in the UK over sexual assault allegations against him in Sweden.

The Metropolitan police said: “He has been taken into custody at a central London police station where he will remain, before being presented before Westminster magistrates court as soon as is possible.  “The MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] had a duty to execute the warrant, on behalf of Westminster magistrates court, and was invited into the embassy by the ambassador, following the Ecuadorian government’s withdrawal of asylum.”

Assange was shouting and gesticulating as he was carried out of the embassy in handcuffs by seven men and put into a waiting Met police van, video footage showed. He appeared to be carrying a book.

Ecuador’s president, Lenín Moreno, said on Twitter: “In a sovereign decision, Ecuador withdrew the asylum status to Julian Assange after his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols.”

The British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, tweeted: “Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law. He has hidden from the truth for years. Thank you Ecuador and President Lenín Moreno for your cooperation with the Foreign Office to ensure Assange faces justice.”

Assange claimed that if he was extradited to Sweden he might be arrested by the US and face charges relating to the publication of hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks.

US authorities have never officially confirmed that they have charged Assange, but in November 2018 a mistake in a document filed in an unrelated case hinted that criminal charges might have been prepared in secret.

The piece in the New York Times looks at the wider picture.  Here are excerpts:

The United States Justice Department has filed criminal charges against Mr. Assange, 47, related to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.  He also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail, . . .

Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.

Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.

Trump Campaign Company Contacted WikiLeaks for Documents Stolen by Russia

Yet another shoe seems to be dropped that further validates the allegations that the Trump/Pence campaign engaged in efforts to collude with Russia in order to damage Hillary Clinton's campaign.  Naturally, as CNN and other real news outlets are reporting on Wikileak's confirmation that the Trump/Pence campaign made contact seeking documents stolen by Russian intelligence from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, Der Trumpenführer is launching into full obfuscation mode and is being aided and abetted by the fake right wing "news" sites who are working desperately to concoct faux counter scandals against Hillary Clinton. It goes without saying that the Fox News viewing, racist and Christofascist base of Trump supporters are eating up the lies flowing from Breitbart and Fox News even as Fox News is ignoring damning new evidence against the Trump/Pence, et al.   It is sadly, all part of the right wing cover up effort for Der Trumpenführer.  Here are highlights on the real news from CNN:

The head of a data analytics company linked to the Trump campaign contacted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2016 regarding thousands of Hillary Clinton's emails kept on a private server while she was secretary of state, according to four sources familiar with the outreach.

Alexander Nix, the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, sent an email to several people including top Donald Trump donor Rebekah Mercer, relaying that he had emailed Assange seeking access to emails from Clinton's private server to turn them into a searchable database for the campaign or a pro-Trump political action committee, two of the sources said.

Cambridge Analytica was hired in the summer of 2016 as part of the Trump campaign's three-pronged data operation, which was led by Brad Parscale and overseen by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
 The attempt at collaboration raises fresh questions about the willingness of people associated with the Trump campaign to work with Wikileaks for political gain. The site, which publishes leaked documents, released hacked emails in July from the Democratic National Committee and in October from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. US intelligence has said the Podesta emails were stolen by Russia and handed over to WikiLeaks through an intermediary.

News of the email exchange comes amid federal investigations into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Parscale, the Trump campaign's digital director, was interviewed Tuesday by the House intelligence committee as part of that inquiry.

Assange confirmed the exchange in a post on Twitter Wednesday. "I can confirm an approach by Cambridge Analytica [prior to November last year] . . . .

Nix and Cambridge Analytica, which is backed by Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, did not respond to requests for comment. After the Daily Beast report published, the Trump campaign issued a statement by campaign executive director Michael S. Glassner: "Once President Trump secured the nomination in 2016, one of the most important decisions we made was to partner with the Republican National Committee on data analytics. Leading into the election, the RNC had invested in the most sophisticated data targeting program in modern American in history, which helped secure our victory in the fall. . . . . Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false."
 The statement does not address contacts between Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks. . . . . Parscale downplayed the campaign's connections to Cambridge Analytica, one of the sources said.

He began working for the Trump Organization's digital team in early 2015 before Trump officially announced his plan to run for office. Parscale and employees from his firm, Giles-Parscale, incorporated some staffers from Cambridge Analytica into their data operation.
 In July 2016, Trump called on Russia to find the emails. - "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be next," Trump said in a news conference.

News of the outreach comes after an earlier disclosure that a Republican operative, Peter W. Smith, had been on the hunt for Clinton's missing emails during the campaign. Smith spoke to The Wall Street Journal in May, saying he and the colleagues he enlisted found five groups of hackers claiming to have 33,000 deleted emails from the private server Clinton used during her tenure as secretary of state. He [Smith] said that he determined two of the groups were Russian. "We knew the people who had these were probably around the Russian government," Smith told the Journal. Smith was found dead of an apparent suicide weeks after the interview. Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, was vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica until he stepped down to run the Trump campaign in August 2016, according to The New York Times. The Mercers are investors in Breitbart News, the far-right site where Bannon served as executive chairman before he ran Trump's campaign.

Political strategist Roger Stone, Trump's long-time confidant, had boasted during the campaign of knowledge about upcoming Wikileaks publication of damaging documents, at one point telling the Boston Herald Radio that he expected "Julian Assange and the Wikileaks people to drop a payload of new documents on a weekly basis fairly soon. 

Given that more than three  quarters of Trump's claims and statements have been documented to be untrue - lies in common parlance - I put little credence on anything Trump and his sycophants say to deflect attention from their underhanded dealings and possible treason.    

Ecuador Restricts Assange/Wikileaks’ Internet Access

Candidly, I will never understand what motivated Ecuador to grant Julian Assnage asylum in its embassy in London.  The man is after all up on rape charges in his home country of Sweden.  If innocent as claimed, he needs to return and face trial and acquittal.  Putting that issue aside, Ecuador seems to have had enough of Assange's efforts working with the Russian government and Russian military intelligence services to disrupt America's presidential election and has cut off Assange's Internet access and crippled Wikileaks' ability to aid Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin's efforts to undermine American democracy.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Ecuador's long over due action.  Here are excerpts:

QUITO, Ecuador — Ecuador’s government acknowledged on Tuesday that it had “temporarily restricted” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London after the whistleblowing site published documents from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaig.

A foreign ministry statement said that while it stands by its decision in 2012 to grant Assange asylum, it doesn’t interfere in foreign elections. Leftist President Rafael Correa’s government said it was acting on its own and not ceding to foreign pressures.

The ministry didn’t specify the extent of the restrictions on Assange’s access to the internet, saying only that the limitations wouldn’t affect WikiLeaks’ ability to carry out its journalistic activities.

The announcement confirmed Wikileaks’ claim that Ecuador was behind the cut-off but disputed its assertion that the decision was made because of U.S. pressure.

The State Department denied the allegation.

“While our concerns about Wikileaks are longstanding, any suggestion that Secretary Kerry or the State Department were involved in shutting down Wikileaks is false,” U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in an email. Speaking to reporters later, deputy spokesman Mark Toner said Kerry never even raised the issue or met with Correa during his visit to Colombia.

Assange has been holed up at the modest embassy suite at No. 3 Hans Crescent for more than four years after skipping bail to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex crimes allegations, a position which — until now — hasn’t prevented him from continuing to play a pivotal role in exposing state secrets and backroom trade deals.

Assange fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy on June 19, 2012, after a drawn-out and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle to being sent to Sweden, where he remains wanted over an allegation of rape. Ecuador granted him asylum, but British authorities have made clear they would arrest him if he tried to leave. London’s Metropolitan Police used to maintain a visible presence outside the building, although officers were nowhere in sight when an AP journalist visited on Tuesday.

Marc Becker, a professor of Latin American history at Truman State University in Missouri, said that while Clinton had successfully pulled Correa into her orbit during her tenure as secretary of state, he doubted Ecuador had merely bowed to U.S. pressure. He ventured that Correa’s government opposes the idea of interfering in another country’s affairs “and doesn’t appreciate their guests using their resources to that end.”

Ecuador needs to boot Assange from its embassy and allow him to face trial in Sweden.

Are Julian Assange and Wikileaks A Russian Front?

I am all for transparency in government and will concede that in its early days I thought that Wikileaks might be a high minded organization working to expose foul government secrets.  Such thoughts died long ago and now that Julian Assange is hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy in London rather than face rape charges in his home country, I view the man as little more than a common criminal.  Worse yet, he seems to be using Wikileaks to harm America while going easy of repressive regimes such as those in Russia and/or China.  Indeed, a piece in The Federalist argues that Assange is nothing more than a front for Russia and Vladimir Putin's anti-American efforts.  Here are some column highlights:

Assange, an enemy of the United States whose organization, WikiLeaks, is fronting for the Russian intelligence services.

Hannity, of course, is not only an ignoramus but a hypocrite whose views shifted when WikiLeaks broke into the Democratic National Committee and Hannity’s idol, Donald Trump, applauded the attack on the Democrats. But Hannity is not alone. Various people and groups, from misinformed college kids to far-right and far-left conspiracy theorists, see Assange as some kind of freedom fighter.

No patriotic American should be celebrating the career of Julian Assange. His dissemination of others’ secrets has nothing to do with democracy and transparency, and everything to do with the sordid underworld of international espionage. WikiLeaks is a functional subsidiary of Vladimir Putin’s intelligence services and Assange—hiding in a London embassy rather than face charges as a sexual predator—is on the end of a long but firm Russian string.

Assange’s defenders will complain there is no smoking gun linking WikiLeaks and its cult leader to Moscow. There isn’t, but that’s because in the real world things don’t happen the way they do in the movies. There is no receipt in a desk waiting to be found by an eager journalist. No child prodigy is going to hack a phone in five minutes and find a voicemail from a man with a thick Russian accent explaining the exact location of a dead drop.

For more sensible people, however, the evidence is damning. First and foremost, WikiLeaks—citizens of the world that they are—never seem able to leak anything damaging to the interests of the Russians. They likewise avoid antagonizing the Chinese or any other autocratic regime that might take umbrage or engage in retaliation. Almost every leak of any consequence is aimed squarely at the United States and its allies, and never as assistance to noble activists anywhere else.

Likewise, the involvement of WikiLeaks in the Edward Snowden affair, catalogued ably by authors like John Schindler, Edward Lucas, and others, was so obviously facilitated by the Russians that it should be used as a case study in Espionage School 101. . . . . If you think Assange’s recommendation, Snowden’s arrival, and Harrison’s presence are at all possible without a cozy relationship with the Russian secret services, then you don’t understand how any of this works.

The Russian goal is to give American democracy a black eye in front of the entire world, while undermining the faith of average Americans in their own political arrangements. If Assange and the Russians have a dog in this fight, it is Donald Trump, and only temporarily: like any other stooge, Trump has value only so long as he is useful in attaining Moscow’s larger aims. What Trump gets out of this is anyone’s guess, but then again, it is difficult to determine the motives of emotionally unstable people.

Despite Assange’s fiery posing, he and WikiLeaks exist at the Russians’ sufferance. Think of Vladimir Putin and his intelligence chiefs as something like a board of directors, and Assange as their CEO: while the board may not direct day-to-day operations, Assange and his staff nonetheless know what’s required to keep their funding stream, their freedom of movement, their access to the media, and perhaps even to maintain their own safety. There might be some smaller operations here and there at the enterprise’s discretion, but the single focus is always the same: undermine the United States.

Russian intelligence and their Wikileaks minions are indeed conspiring against them. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, and “freedom” activists who applaud these kinds of activities, and who wish for Assange’s freedom, are dupes. They are also sympathizing with their own enemies, which also makes them fools.

It even makes them useful idiots, one might even say.

Has Wikileaks Played Trump Supporters?

Today after much lead up and fanfare Wikileaks held a "major press conference" today where Donald Trump supporters hoped - some were in near orgasmic frenzy - would drop an "October surprise" and doom Hillary Clinton's presidential run.  What happened?  Basically, nothing.  Despite all the hype, Wikileaks failed to deliver.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at how Trump supporters seemingly were played for fools.  Here are excerpts:

The expectations were breathless.

For weeks, backers of Republican nominee Donald Trump hyped the tantalizing possibility that the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks was on the verge of publishing a set of documents that would doom Hillary Clinton’s chances in November.

“@HillaryClinton is done,” longtime Trump associate Roger Stone tweeted Saturday. “#Wikileaks.”

The group’s founder, Julian Assange, did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm, suggesting to Fox News hosts that his scoops could upend the race with documents “associated with the election campaign, some quite unexpected angles, some quite interesting.”

The announcement by WikiLeaks that it would host a major news conference Tuesday only seemed to confirm that the bombshell was ready to burst. The pro-Trump, anti-Clinton media world rippled with fevered speculation.

But if an October surprise about the Democratic nominee really is coming, it will have to wait a little longer.

Over the course of two hours on Tuesday — with the world’s media and bleary-eyed Trump die-hards across the United States tuning in — Assange and other WikiLeaks officials railed against “neo-McCarthyist hysteria,” blasted the mainstream media, appealed for donations and plugged their books (“40 percent off!”).

But what they didn’t do was provide any new information about Clinton — or about anything else, really.

The much-vaunted news conference, as it turned out, was little more than an extended infomercial for WikiLeaks on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of its founding.

That didn’t go over well with Trump backers who had stayed up through the night, thinking they’d be watching live the unveiling of the death blow to the Clinton campaign.

Assange, as it turns out, had taken a page from Trump’s own playbook by drawing an audience with a tease, only to leave those tuning in feeling that they’d been tricked.

Infowars, the pro-Trump and virulently anti-Clinton media vehicle launched by Texas radio host Alex Jones, had touted the WikiLeaks news conference as “historic” and promised that “the Clintons will be devastated.”

Before Assange took the stage, Jones — who broadcast through the wee hours of the American morning — told viewers and listeners that he was so excited he was worried his heart couldn't stand it.

But by the end, Jones realized he’d been played — or in his words, “#wikirolled.”

For those who have forgotten, Assange is an accused rapist - which is why he is hiding out in the Ecuadorian embassy after fleeing his home country.

 

Putin and Russia - Wilileaks' Main Beneficiary

With Russian hackers attacking news outlets, the Democrat party and perhaps now American voting systems, one seeming ally is Wikileaks and its egotistical founder Julian Assange who remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London as he avoids possible prosecution for rape in Sweden.  A length pieces in the New York Times looks at Assange and his apparent alliance with Russia and Vladimir Putin and a mutual goal of harming America and western democracies in general.  The hypocrisy of Assange displayed by his actions and those of Wikileaks versus his supposed goals is stunning, especially in the way Assange ignores the murder of Putin's political opponents.  Any respect I might have had for Wikileaks is gone and I now view Assange as a dangerous, dangerous and perhaps delusional individual.  Here are some story highlights:

From the cramped confines of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum four years ago amid a legal imbroglio, Mr. Assange proffered a vision of America as superbully: a nation that has achieved imperial power by proclaiming allegiance to principles of human rights while deploying its military-intelligence apparatus in “pincer” formation to “push” countries into doing its bidding, and punishing people like him who dare to speak the truth.

Notably absent from Mr. Assange’s analysis, however, was criticism of another world power, Russia, or its president, Vladimir V. Putin, who has hardly lived up to WikiLeaks’ ideal of transparency. Mr. Putin’s government has cracked down hard on dissent — spying on, jailing, and, critics charge, sometimes assassinating opponents while consolidating control over the news media and internet. If Mr. Assange appreciated the irony of the moment — denouncing censorship in an interview on Russia Today, the Kremlin-controlled English-language propaganda channel — it was not readily apparent.
Now, Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks are back in the spotlight, roiling the geopolitical landscape with new disclosures and a promise of more to come.

In July, the organization released nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails suggesting that the party had conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to undermine her primary opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Assange — who has been openly critical of Mrs. Clinton — has promised further disclosures that could upend her campaign against the Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump. Separately, WikiLeaks announced that it would soon release some of the crown jewels of American intelligence: a “pristine” set of cyberspying codes.

That raises a question: Has WikiLeaks become a laundering machine for compromising material gathered by Russian spies? And more broadly, what precisely is the relationship between Mr. Assange and Mr. Putin’s Kremlin?

Those questions are made all the more pointed by Russia’s prominent place in the American presidential election campaign. Mr. Putin, who clashed repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, has publicly praised Mr. Trump, who has returned the compliment, calling for closer ties to Russia and speaking favorably of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea.

Mr. Assange said he was motivated by a desire to use “cryptography to protect human rights,” and would focus on authoritarian governments like Russia’s.  But a New York Times examination of WikiLeaks’ activities during Mr. Assange’s years in exile found a different pattern: Whether by conviction, convenience or coincidence, WikiLeaks’ document releases, along with many of Mr. Assange’s statements, have often benefited Russia, at the expense of the West.

To Gavin MacFadyen, a WikiLeaks supporter who runs the Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of London, the question for Mr. Assange is not where the material comes from, but whether it is true and in the public interest. He noted that intelligence services had a long history of using news organizations to plant stories, and that Western news outlets often published “material that comes from the C.I.A. uncritically.”

Recent events, though, have left some transparency advocates wondering if WikiLeaks has lost its way. There is a big difference between publishing materials from a whistle-blower like Chelsea Manning — the soldier who gave WikiLeaks its war log and diplomatic cable scoops — and accepting information, even indirectly, from a foreign intelligence service seeking to advance its own powerful interests, said John Wonderlich, the executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a group devoted to government transparency.

Others see Mr. Assange assuming an increasingly blinkered approach to the world that, coupled with his own secrecy, has left them disillusioned.

Another person who collaborated with WikiLeaks in the past added: “He views everything through the prism of how he’s treated. America and Hillary Clinton have caused him trouble, and Russia never has.”

The result has been a “one-dimensional confrontation with the U.S.A.,” Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who before quitting WikiLeaks in 2010 was one of Mr. Assange’s closest partners, has said.

And the beneficiary of that confrontation, played out in a series of public statements by Mr. Assange and strategically timed document releases by WikiLeaks, has often been Mr. Putin.

Like Mr. Trump, who stood to gain from the Democratic Party leak, Mr. Assange supported Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, and he has repeatedly gone after NATO — taking on two organizations that Mr. Putin would like nothing more than to defang or dismantle.

WikiLeaks Outed Gay Men In Countries with Death Penalty for Gays

My opinion of Wilikleaks has been plummeting and news that the organization has callously "outed" gays in countries where gays face the death penalty as well as identified rape victims and victims of domestic violence in countries where the victims face potential violence.  One of the countries where such disclosures have been made is Saudi Arabia - America's false ally - where gays are routinely executed.  Apparently, the self-stroking of Julian Assnge's ego is more important that the lives of those his organization is endangering. Towleroad looks at these despicable and uncaring actions.  Here are highlights:

A new report out Tuesday has found that hacktivist group WikiLeaks has on more than one occasion outed gay men in Saudi Arabia, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.

WikiLeaks has increasingly shown little discretion when it comes to withholding private details about individuals named in documents it leaks online, even those of individuals who have nothing to do with the organization’s raison d’être: “We open governments.” Rather, it seems that WikiLeaks has no interest in taking the time to redact personal information that, if revealed, could endanger the lives of private citizens who have played no role in the Machiavellian machinations of statecraft it seeks to expose.

In the report, the AP found a staggering amount of “collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill” in WikiLeaks’ leaked documents. Among a trove of cables from Saudi Arabia, for instance, medical records and other personal information was revealed that effectively outs closeted gay men in that country. As the AP notes, “the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.”

The AP was able to get in touch with that man who said, “[WikiLeaks] published everything: my phone, address, name, details. If the family of my wife saw this … Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.” That individual is also in the midst of a custody dispute with a former partner.

WikiLeaks has also published medical records of teenage rape victims, including a male teen:

Three Saudi cables published by the WikiLeaks identified domestic workers who’d been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women’s full names and passport numbers. One cable named a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; a second identified another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken; a third outlined the details of a Saudi man detained for “sexual deviation” — a derogatory term for homosexuality.

Scott Long, an LGBT rights activist who has worked in the Middle East, said the names of rape victims were off-limits. And he worried that releasing the names of people persecuted for their sexuality only risked magnifying the harm caused by oppressive officials.

“You’re legitimizing their surveillance, not combating it,” Long said.

Apparently, in 2016, medical records are no longer a legitimate secret, even if you’re gay and/or a victim of rape. It is unclear at this point if WikiLeaks has outed gay individuals in other anti-LGBT countries besides Saudi Arabia.

I have come to believe that the best place for Assange may well be in prison where, with luck, he will suffer severely for the harm he has done to innocents.